Last week, Time Magazine had a fascinating article on risk and how humans tend to worry about a lot of things that just aren’t very likely, while practically ignoring real and significant probabilities. Instead of being afraid of planes or snakes or mad cow disease, we ought to be afraid of smoking, heart disease, and cancer.
A couple of years ago, I was wondering if it’s really true that the odds of being struck by lightning are greater than the odds of winning the lottery. I had heard this over and over, but I was skeptical enough to check it out…
When you look into it, calculating the odds of being struck by lightning is somewhat complicated. According to Storm Data, a National Weather Service publication, on average seventy-three lightning fatalities are reported in the United States each year. However, due to under-reporting the actual death total is thought to be around one hundred. Fortunately, your odds of being killed when struck by lightning are only one in ten, but this translates into somewhere around one thousand people who are struck by lightning each year nationwide. And, apparently, if you are struck, the National Weather Service expects you to be injured and suffer some degree of disability, because they assume that all lightning injuries get reported.
What are the potential injuries you ask? Well, lightning affects mostly the brain and the nervous system. So, after the intense headaches, ringing in the ears, dizziness, and nausea subside, a lightning victim may typically have problems concentrating and experience short-term memory loss. A lightning victim may typically have problems concentrating and experience short-term memory loss. Wait, huh?
The odds are based upon the estimated total deaths and reported injuries against the 2000 U.S. Census population of approximately 280 million. This puts their calculation of the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year at one in 240,000, while the odds of being struck by lightning in an eighty-year lifetime go all the way up to one in 3,000.
I haven’t been able to figure out which year these calculations were made or when the average was seventy-three deaths per year. During the past few years, the death toll has actually declined to average around fifty per year, while the population has continued to grow. So, I figure the updated odds of being struck by lightning in a lifetime would decrease to around one in 4,500.
So, how does this compare to winning the lottery? Well, according to the Illinois Lottery website, the odds of winning first prize in the Lotto Game are one in 10,179,260, while the odds of winning the Mega Millions Game are only one in 135,145,920. I also read a 2004 Charlotte Observer article about lightning strikes and the lottery that put the odds of winning the Powerball lottery jackpot at one in 120,526,770.
The numbers pretty much speak for themselves. You’re not very likely to win the lottery. By my calculations, if you played the Lotto Game every week for a year, then your odds would become better than the odds of being struck by lightning that year, (assuming of course that you don’t waterski during thunderstorms in the summer.) The Mega Millions and Powerball games have much worse odds. You would really have to buy a ton of tickets to get better odds than being struck by lightning. So, this is one popular belief that turns out to be fact, not fiction.
An interesting fact in the Time article is that more than ten times as many people die from falling out of bed than from being struck by lightning. So, I’m going to take the money I would have spent on the lottery and buy rugs and pads to surround my bed. That way, I’ll live to be a hundred.
Links:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562978,00.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/sd/
http://www.census.gov
http://www.illinoislottery.com
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/
